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Michelle Kleinberg

February 20, 2011

Senior Thesis

Food in Contemporary Fiction:

A Catalyst in Identity Formation Across Multi-Ethnic Cultures

“Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” - Brillat-Savarin

Food is the common denominator of humanity. No matter what culture, creed

or race—everyone must eat to live. The symbolic importance of food dates back to

the Old Testament where in The Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve indulge in the

Garden of Eden’s forbidden fruit. Thousands of years after the Old Testament was

written, the reference of fruit in Western literature often draws ties to, and remains

symbolic of this teaching. However, the symbolic nature of food in literature has

become even more significant since the late fourteenth century as writers have used

food as inspiration, symbolism, plot device, poetry, metaphor and most importantly,

common ground between differing cultures and geography. Many of the world’s most

influential writers such as Shakespeare, Joyce, Thoreau, Twain, Proust, Cervantes,

Chaucer, Hemmingway and more, use food in their writings. According to scholar

Mary Schofield, food “articulates in concrete terms what is oftentimes vague, internal,

abstract… Food cooked, eaten, and thought about provides a metaphoric matrix, a

language that allows us a away to get at the uncertainty, the ineffable qualities of life”
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(1).

These “ineffable qualities of life” are often related to the cultural identity of a

specific people as what they eat is telling of the culture they come from and how it

shapes their personal identity. That is the reason why food in multi-ethnic literature is

especially significant. According to The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic

Literature of the United States, “In the United States, relationships between food and

ethnicity bear historical, social, cultural, economic, political, and psychological

significance” (Gardaphe, Xu 5). At the turn of the twentieth century, immigration

brought distinct national groups, races, and ethnicities to the United States

(Weisberger 1). Immigration for these groups meant assimilating to American culture

yet maintaining traditions, flavors, and most importantly, a sense of identity. This

essay will present four works of literary fiction that centralize the meaning of food in

various ethnic literary traditions; Latino-American, Jewish-American, Asian-

American and Arab-American writing. Despite the differences in race, ethnicity, and

creed among these cultures, the exploration of food and traditions suggest that there is

a similar human struggle as food becomes a medium for balancing freedom,

belonging, and cultural identity within the demands of a new culture.

The novel Dreaming In Cuban, written by the Cuban-American author

Christina Garcia explores and connects women’s food experiences to racial, ethnic,

and political issues during times of cultural revolution (O’Reilly Herrera 71). The

novel is constructed around three generations of vivid female characters, each

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responding differently to the Cuban revolution and assimilation to American culture

both directly and indirectly. Garcia commendably uses each of her strong female

characters to show how revolution and immigration serves as a strategic medium in

which each of these women’s identities become significant through the usage of food.

The first character introduced in the novel is Celia del Pino, the first

generation of the del Pino women, whose role in the novel is intertwined with

domestic and revolutionary duties as her country and identity as a Cuban comes under

attack. Celia uses her home as a “primary lookout for the north coast of Cuba…

equipped with binoculars and wearing her best housedress and drop pearl earrings”

(Garcia 3). This quotation shows how women gained new freedoms during the

revolution as they participated directly in the revolution. As Celia’s identity as a

Cuban woman is called into question she relates her feelings of disconnect and

uneasiness to food and its importance in desperate measures for survival. As she sits

guarding her home she watches the ocean and observes the state of her once familiar

country saying,

In an hour or two, the fisherman will return, nets empty. The yanquis, rumors
go, have ringed the island with nuclear poison, hoping to starve the people…
They will drop germ bombs to wither the sugarcane fields, blacken the rivers,
blind the horses and pigs. (Garcia 4)

Celia uses the metaphor of poison, starvation, and ruining the resources that are

necessary to live to describe the state of her country. Her people are being stripped of
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the primary essentials to live, which show the great impact the revolution is having on

this first generation of Cubans in this novel. The symbolic nature of sugar becomes

very important as the novel progresses, as sugar was one of Cuba’s most important

and culturally identifying resources. This passage stresses the revolutionary situation

in Cuba and the importance of the symbolic nature of the description of food, and its

presence even within a political sphere can have a significant impact.

Lourdes Puentes is Celia’s daughter, representative of the second generation of

women in the novel. Unlike Celia, Lourdes fanatically disagrees with her mother’s

political views concerning Cuba’s revolution and immigrates with her husband

Rufino and her daughter Pilar to the United States. After arriving, Lourdes cannot

tolerate living in Miami because of her desperateness to live somewhere bearing no

resemblance to her newly forgotten country. “‘This is cold enough,’ she finally said

when they reached New York” (García 70). Once Lourdes settles in Brooklyn, New

York, she purchases a pastry shop, which she suitably names Yankee Doodle Bakery

and within a short period of time her business succeeds. According to Gustavo Perez

Firmat, author of Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, (1995) Lourdes can

be considered a “1.5er”, or an immigrant who neither feels comfortable in American

or Cuban culture because of the inability to never truly identify as a Cuban unlike

their parents (Payant 1). This is why she pulls away from anything that reminds her of

Cuba and searches for an American identity as a businesswoman. Although the

bakery symbolizes Lourdes’ newfound American success, Celia’s obsession with

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sugary-sweet baked goods is blatantly apparent.

There are Grand Marnier cakes and napoleons with striped icing and
chantily cream. Lourdes unpacks three Sacher tortes and a Saint Honore
studded with profiteroles, Linzer bars with raspberry jam, éclairs…She scrapes
the trays of raising and honey and pops the sugary morsels into her
mouth. Lourdes saves the pecan sticky buns for last. She unloads a tray of
them from the delivery cart, reserving two to eat later (Garcia 20).

None of what Lourdes sells at her bakery resembles Cuban culture as all of her cakes

and cookies stem from European or American cuisine. Ironically, Cuba’s growth of

sugarcane has played an extremely important role in Cuba’s history, as seen in Celia’s

passage above. Despite Lourdes’s desire to remove herself from her Cuban culture

and roots, she finds herself addicted to sugar, gaining one hundred and eighteen

pounds. She even dreams of baked goods—bread, cakes and cookies. Cuban

American poet Ricardo Pau-Llosa has said, “the exile knows his place, and that place

is the imagination” (Fimat 10). Despite Lourdes’s eagerness to detach herself from

anything Cuban, she cannot escape it. Her addiction to sugar symbolizes her being

stuck in between her inevitable Cuban identity and the American one she strives so

desperately to attain.

Pilar, undoubtedly Garcia’s richest character, holds a strong understanding of

the painful loss of Cuba’s history and her personal deprivation of Cuban culture

because of the revolution. As a granddaughter living in New York, Pilar is fully

conscious of the fact that Cuba’s revolution has caused her feelings of dislocation and
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loss of identity. She says,

I resent the hell out of politicians and the generals who force events on
us that structure our lives… that dictate the memories we’ll have when
we’re old. Every day Cuba fades a little more inside me, my
grandmother fades a little more inside me. And there’s only
imagination where our history should be. (Garcia 138)

This imagination that Pilar speaks of shows her awareness as a young adult. She feels

a strong connection to Cuba however she doesn’t know why. In regards to food, Pilar

is twice removed from Cuban culture. Because of her mother’s investment and

affinity for sweets, Pilar hates working at her mother’s bakery and does not eat sugar

as her mother does. As a Cuban American, she finds comfort in the American food

that surrounds her. When she runs away from her home and takes a bus to Florida, the

first thing she does when she arrives is order a BLT sandwich and an orange soda at

an American diner. Pilar understands what immigration has done to her family and

wants so badly to return to her roots. She says,

Mom makes food only people in Ohio eat, like Jell-O molds with miniature
marshmallows or recipes she clips from Family Circle. And she barbecues
anything she can get her hands on. Then we sit around behind the warehouse
and stare at each other with nothing to say. Like this is it? We’re living the
American dream? (Garcia 137)

It is clear through this passage that Pilar craves an identity that is more than just the
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average American family. She does not want to stray away from her Cuban culture,

she craves to understand it and be a part of it, very unlike her mother. On

Thanksgiving day she says to her mother, “I think migration scrambles the appetite…

I think I may move back to Cuba someday and decide to eat nothing but codfish and

chocolate” (173). She wants so badly to identify with something more and is stuck

because she is generations away from who she believes she wants to be. The lack of

cultural food in Pilar’s life causes her to crave an identity that is Cuban, and she

understands that part of a cultural identity revolves around eating food that is native to

one’s heritage. It is merely another Cuban strand of identity that she craves and

wishes she had.

The role of food and culture in Christina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban is

one of immeasurable importance. However the growing disconnect between each

generation and the roots of their cultural foods shows the difficulties faced in

immigrating and assimilating to American culture. Through the direct parallelism

between revolution, immigration and food, the women in this novel struggle to

maintain ties to their Cuban identity and cultural roots.

The Inn at Lake Devine, written by Elinor Lipman is a novel that follows a

Jewish American girl and her family throughout the 1960s. From childhood through

adulthood, Natalie Marx, the novel’s main character, faces discrimination because she

is Jewish in a predominantly Christian, New England suburb. Despite the

discrimination Natalie and her family face throughout the novel, food becomes one of
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the main ways for the Marx family to maintain their cultural roots and Jewish identity

as food takes on symbolic meaning, especially when identifying Jews from

Christians. However, in Natalie’s case, food becomes much more than her Jewish

identity—it becomes her identity as a progressive woman when she uses food not to

exemplify differences between cultures but to bring people together, despite race or

religion.

As aforementioned in the introduction, fruit can be very symbolic in literature.

In this novel, fruit is used as a symbol of temptation and immediately sets up religious

undertones and themes. The novel is divided into two parts, the main character’s

childhood, which includes some of her parents’ back-story and her adulthood.

Natalie’s father, Eddie Marx ran his father’s fruit truck as a young man and later

inherited the business. When Natalie’s mother, Audrey, and father, Eddie, first meet,

he offers her peaches saying, “They’re ripe, they’re juicy, they’re delicious” (18). At

this moment fruit becomes symbolic of lust and temptation especially as the next

chapter reveals that Audrey Marx is pregnant. Fruit is also symbolic of fertility,

growth and creation. The Marx family begins because of fruit as they also begin to

bare their own fruit. Because of the Jewish religious tradition, Audrey and Eddie are

immediately married. Even before the reader is introduced to the main character and

storyline, the role and importance of food can be seen as a significant symbol and

thematic vessel.

The main character Natalie narrates as the novel opens, “It was not
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complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel;

they didn’t want Jews; we were Jews” (1). From the very beginning, the identity of

Natalie and her family is clear. They are Jewish. However, as a child, Natalie Marx

doesn’t understand how “people named Marx would be unwelcome in the United

States” (4). However, the multi-ethnic experience for the Marx family differs from

the Cuban-American immigration experience in Garcia’s novel. Natalie does not deal

with the same assimilation issues as Pilar because she is a fourth generation

immigrant, further removed from her grandparent’s origins than Pilar. She does begin

to question her identity after her mother receives a vacation inquiry response saying,

“Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are gentiles.

Very truly yours, Mrs. Ingrid Berry, Reservations Manager” (4). This is the first time

Natalie’s identity as a child is called into question and she becomes obsessed with the

Berry family’s Inn at Lake Devine. Although her mother and father dismiss the

Berry’s response to their requisition as ignorant and poor mannered, Natalie is

seriously affected by the discrimination her family faces. She does not understand

why anyone would choose to show prejudice against her family who act and live just

as other Americans do.

In 1964, Natalie writes the Inn a letter on behalf of the U.S. House of

Representatives stating, “It isn’t only Colored people who are helped by this law.

Jewish people and other you have excluded in the recent past must now be welcome

at your accommodations. It is the law of the land” (8). Natalie wants to make right
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what she feels has been done to her and her family. As a child, this is all she can do,

and it most definitely sets up the political and social time in which the novel takes

place, which allows Natalie to explore the strong identity that is tied to the Marx

family and their Jewish heritage.

When Natalie is invited by her friend Robin Fife, from sleep away summer

camp, to join her and her family during their summer vacation, she is thrilled to find

out they will be staying at the Inn at Lake Devine. Despite Natalie’s search for

outward anti-semitism or discrimination against her on vacation, she returns home

disappointed. Food comes into play for the first time as a way to identify cultural

differences when Natalie returns home. Her family is extremely curious about the

food and ask, “Who cooked?...Fresh vegetables or canned?...What kind of

bread?...Rolls every night?...Did she do the desserts too?” (52). Still searching for

something to distinguish herself as being mistreated or discriminated against, Natalie

notices something about the food served at the inn. She narrates,

The pork at Lake Devine. It appeared more and more frequently during my
stay, until it seemed that every dish left the kitchen scrambled with ham or
garnished with bacon. So I asked, incapable of leaving it unsaid, ‘Do most
restaurants put ham in everything?’
‘Ham at every meal?’ my mother asked.
I said no: sausages, bacon, ham steaks, B.L.T.s, pork roasts, the pale goyishe
frankfurters of sporting events, matloaf crisscrossed with limp strips of bacon,
deviled ham sandwiches on a picnic lunch.
‘That’s how the goyim cook,’ said my mother.
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‘I hope you didn’t complain,’ said my father.

I said no, I hadn’t complained…I didn’t want them to think that Jews were
difficult. (Lipman 52)

At this point in the novel, Natalie uses the difference between Jewish tradition

to exemplify the difference between culture between Jews and non-Jews such as the

Berry’s. Norman Friedman, author of “Jewish Popular Culture in Contemporary

American” states, “the most important and distinctive artifact of Jewish food popular

culture is the ‘kosher style’… ‘eating Jewish,’ at first in the home and later outside

the home, constitutes a common and memorable experience for most American Jews”

(Friedman 266). Although the Marx family does not follow a strict Kosher diet or

practice their religion in an Orthodox fashion, according to Friedman, they do

represent the “nostalgic family feeling about Jewishness, even if other concrete

manifestations of Jewish identification are weak or absent” (Friedman 267). This

argument allows the reader to understand the Marx family’s identity as being Jewish.

Their relationship with food expresses their difference as Jews within a

predominantly Christian neighborhood, especially as they use basic Yiddish within

their household, something that many of their neighbors would be unfamiliar with.

Basic Yiddish is often a feature of contemporary Jewish culture and is commonly

used within the Jewish community today, especially when referring to food (Friedman

273). According to Friedman,

Jewish food and basic Yiddish are a modified and undemanding link with
tradition…the meanings which people attach to Jewish culture revolve
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extensively around sociability and nostalgia. Jewish food and basic Yiddish
seem to arouse or maintain memories of home, family, and growing up
Jewish. (Friedman 275)

This is most certainly true for Natalie when she returns and finds the differences

between the food served at the inn and in her home. Although she does not face any

religious conflict in eating so much pork while at the inn, she does understand that the

foods she regularly eats, and the Yiddish words of her mother, make her feel

immediately at home. After eating too many dark chocolate covered cherries, her

mother says to her, in Yiddish, “Enough” and with that, the reader is transported from

Natalie’s childhood to adulthood in part two of the novel.

As the novel enters Natalie Marx’s post college adulthood, the reader

understands that Natalie’s passion for food has turned into something more than just a

connection to her Jewish heritage and her family. After Natalie returns home from

college, she begins cooking classes and after she “stuck around long enough to be the

best knife handler and saucier”, she got her first job in a French restaurant as a salad

prepper, under the care of the executive chef and owner, Monsieur P (Lipman 81). As

Natalie works hard, long hours, struggling to impress her boss, she encounters a

significant roadblock when she is invited to a Robin Fife’s wedding at the Inn at Lake

Devine and has go on a date with her boss at his restaurant in order to try to get the

day off. When he makes a pass at her she replies, “You think it’s fair to ask me to

have sex with you?... It’s my choice, then: no sex, no days off?... Do you think it’s
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right to ask for sex in exchange for two vacation days? Do you think it’s ethical?”

(Lipman 86). At this point in the novel it becomes apparent that Natalie’s job as a

chef is not more important than her sense of self as a moral woman. Although

Natalie’s love for cooking and food is strong, she is more willing to stand up for who

she is and what she believes then to let anyone take advantage of her. The food in this

specific chapter serves as a tool for the reader to understand the person Natalie has

become as an adult. She is no longer a child and has entered adulthood, paving the

way for further character development which leads to her finding her identity as

Jewish-American woman.

When Natalie arrives at the Inn at Lake Devine ready to attend Robin’s

wedding, the family finds out terrible news that Robin is killed in a car accident. As

the family grieves and mourns the loss of their daughter and soon to be daughter-in-

law, Natalie cooks. She says, “Mostly, I stayed out of the way by cooking…Comfort

foods for lunch and dinner—plain custards and clear soups that were sent without

fanfare and returned untouched” (Lipman 97). The fact that Natalie resorts to

cooking during this time of grief exemplifies the comfort she feels in cooking. Not

only does she understand that food can bring healing to others, it is healing for her.

According to Gian-Paolo Biasin, author of The Flavors of Modernity, “food can be a

privileged catalyst of the relations need-desire and desire-satisfaction, both in a

strictly alimentary sense and in the area of eroticism [emotion]” (Biasin 14). The

relationship between Natalie and the Fife family at the inn becomes a dependent
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relationship because they need to be fed and Natalie desires the satisfaction that

comes from feeding them and feeling as though she is helping. Cooking food for

these people builds Natalie’s purpose as she realizes that the people she thought were

very different from her as a child are just as she and her family would be if they were

faced with such a tragedy. She begins to be drawn closer and closer to the families

involved and eventually falls in love with Kris, Mrs. Berry’s son. This becomes one

of the main conflicts Natalie faces as an adult because of the discrimination she feels

from Mrs. Berry and the scrutiny she feels from her own family for deciding to

develop a relationship with someone outside of her faith and ethnicity.

The relationship between Natalie and Kris develops into a complicated

situation where Natalie’s parents do not want their second daughter to marry outside

of the Jewish faith and Mrs. Berry does not like the idea of her son marrying Natalie

because of her prejudice against Jews. As Kris and Natalie attempt to get away from

the tension between their families, they decide to spend a weekend at a Catskill’s

hotel called the Halseeyon. This lavish Jewish resort serves as a contrast to the small,

discreet Inn at Lake Devine and the lavish Kosher meals with multiple main courses

exemplify the Jewish culture and it’s stress on eating and nurturing, as seen in the

passage below.

He handed me the breakfast menu and pointed to a list of various pickled and
smoked fish, and every fruit that had ever been dried, stewed, or buried in sour
cream…(He) was back with several small glasses of juice and my
canned figs, asking about eggs. I said, ‘Lox, eggs, and onions, please. And a
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toasted bagel.’ ‘I’ll try’ Kris said, scanning the list of two dozen possibilities,
‘a jelly omelet with a side order of Belgian waffles.’ He plucked the menus out
of our hands… He’s uncomfortable being the only goy in the place. (Lipman 186)

This passage demonstrates the differences between Kris’s and Natalie’s cultural

identities and shows that Kris is the outsider in this situation. The actual role of food

strengthens Friedman’s argument as he states,

There has been an emphasis through Jewish history on food as a positive

good…This positive stress on food has led to much popular psychoanalytic
speculation…because of the richness of many Jewish foods and/or the
expression of Jewish maternal love through over-feeding. (Friedman 266)

This over-feeding is unquestionably apparent at the Halseeyon, as Natalie and Kris

are overwhelmed by the options presented to them. There is so much food and they

can have it all if they choose. The foods also mentioned in the above excerpt from

the novel represent “Jewish foods”, which Friedman describes as “Eastern European

dishes adopted and adapted from the countries in which Jews lived…bagels,

matzohs, latkes, blinzes, lox, gefillte fish, chopped herring…” (Friedman 266).

Through cultural tradition these foods still remain “Jewish foods” today and is seen

throughout this novel. In contrast to the Inn at Lake Devine’s serving pork at every

meal, the Halseeyon is a Kosher establishment, not serving pork, shellfish, or meat

and dairy in the same meal. Natalie is familiar with the foods that surround her while

Kris is not and this is not only noticeable to Natalie, but to the Jewish community
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that surrounds them. At this point in the novel, the cultural differences between

Natalie and Kris are blatantly apparent. Despite their differences in culture, however,

both characters embrace their individual upbringings and traditions without

judgments or disdain. The people that do have trouble accepting their differences are

their parents. When Natalie and Kris visit the Inn at Lake Devine and tell Mrs. Berry

about the food at the Halseeyon, she says, “The Catskills are known for that. Our

guests don’t come here expecting every meal to be a feast, the way New Yorkers do”

(Lipman 212). Natalie responds, saying, “I’ve read about it in literature…food

customs and preferences, broken down by region and ethnicity. Jews, Italians, and

Lebanese love to eat. The French do too, but not over here. They hate margarine and

sliced white bread” (Lipman 212). The food differences between Jewish food and

non-Jewish food at both establishments re-emphasize the divide between Jewish and

non-Jewish culture. Although Natalie strongly identifies with her Jewish heritage,

food, and culture, she is unwilling to give into her parents’ judgments and Mrs.

Berry’s racism. Natalie confronts Kris’s father, Mr. Berry about the prejudice her

family faced when they inquired about vacationing at the Inn and says, “It’s not that

complicated, a hotel is not a home. It’s a business. You can’t turn people away

because of race or religion or anything like that” (Lipman 220). This is the first time

in the novel that racism is confronted head on yet she realizes and says, “What

counts is between me and Kris, not me and Igrid (Mrs. Berry), not me and my
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parents” (Lipman 226). Natalie decides the fight is not worth fighting and despite the

differences between her family and Kris’s, she is confident enough in her identity as

a strong independent woman to make the right decisions for herself.

The last instance where food is used is the most crucial part of the story that

results in the resolution of the novel. When Natalie is introduced to the Inn’s chef as

“Kris’s little friend who had some ideas about pepping up the menu”, Natalie

observes the chef “reconstituting various powders into liquids” and “her upper arms

shaking from the friction of desiccated cheese against metal” and asks the chef if she

ever makes anything from scratch (Lipman 230). The chef does not respond and

even though Natalie offers to help, the chef says everything is already done. Natalie

decides to make one extra dish, a mushroom lasagna that she claims is “nothing too

exotic, noodles, cream, Parmesan, Ricotta, Mozarella” (Lipman 231). Natalie finds

mushrooms that Mr. Berry has picked himself, labeled “Honey mushrooms, 10/74,

behind Loon Cottage”, and her and Kris are the only two people at the Inn who

choose to eat the “Lasagna Bianco con Funghi” (Lipman 231). Subsequently, Kris

and Natalie wake up with terrible stomach pains and are immediately hospitalized

and diagnosed with food poisoning from poisonous mushrooms. As they both

struggle to stay alive, their parents sit in the hospital waiting room together, leaning

on each other for support. Natalie states, “My parents’ generalized fury at all things

Berry softened as they paced with Ingrid and Karl, waiting—first, for their children

to die, and then for them to come back” (Lipman 235). The poisonous food that
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Natalie and Kris both consumed ironically joins their families together. It also joins

Natalie and Kris in marriage as they realize that their lives are too precious to let

their cultural differences get in the way of their love. Immediately after the incident,

however, Natalie finds herself unable to get back in the kitchen and cook. When she

stops cooking, she loses a part of her identity and decides to work at her mother’s

real estate company without purpose or passion. When Kris tells her “You’ll cook

again,” Natalie decides to get back into the kitchen and begins to remember what it

felt like to be herself again. According to Harriet Blodgett, author of “Food Imagery

in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing”, food is an “identification as central and

honorific a factor in the shaping of a female identity” and for Natalie, food

significantly contributes to her identity as a progressive woman in the United States;

accepting and embracing all cultures, but most importantly, loving and

understanding her own identity as a Jewish-American woman (Blodgett 263).

Frank Chin’s Donald Duk, is a novel that follows a Chinese-American boy

through the fifteen day period of the celebration of the Chinese New Year. The main

character, Donald Duk, is turning twelve years old and will soon be completing his

first zodiac cycle, which signifies his transition from boyhood to manhood. Donald

Duk is conflicted, much like Pilar in Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, and can also be

considered a 1.5er because he struggles to find his identity and sense of self living in

San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1990s. The novel opens, “Who would believe

anyone named Donald Duk dances like Fred Astaire?...Donald Duk wants to live the
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late night life in old black and white movies and talk with his feet like Fred Astaire,

and smile Fred Astaire’s sweet lemonade smile” (Chin 1). Donald uses Fred Astaire

as a symbol for the all-American person he wishes he could be. He gets teased at his

private school because of his name and because he is different from his classmates,

yet all he wants is to be seen as American. He doesn’t want to make his name into a

joke to protect himself from getting bullied. He wants to be as American as

lemonade.

Food plays a very important role throughout this novel, as much of Donald

Duk’s family’s identity is related to his father’s profession as a chef and restaurant

owner. San Francisco’s Chinatown, according to historian Terrie Epstein, “Provided

a hub of intellectual and social life for the Chinese. As a way to maintain their

cultural identities…” (Epstein 51). Because so many Chinese live the same

concentrated area of Chinatown in the novel, everyone knows that Donald Duk is the

son of King Duk, who owns one of the best Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. King

Duk is known by the community for having the most authentic Chinese food in

Chinatown and during the New Year most of the community eats in his restaurant.

However, Donald Duk is not proud that his father cooks authentic Chinese food and

that he is known all over town as King Duk’s son. Donald Duk says, “Everything

Chinese in his life seems to be awful…Dad never complains or stops smiling when

Donald Duk asks for what thinks is pure American food. Steaks. Chops,” (Chin 8).

Donald wants to be less Chinese and tries to not eat Chinese food. Instead, he asks
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his father to cook everything else; hoping that the food he eats will somehow make

him less Chinese and more American. Arnold is proud of his father when he cooks

food that isn’t Chinese and states, “Dad cooks without a book” (Chin 9). However,

when Donald hears his father speak, he says, “Daddy has an awful Chinatown

accent. Daddy is not rich” (Chin 8). Donald is embarrassed of his name, the Chinese

language, food and culture that consume his everyday life and wants nothing more

than to be only American—not Chinese.

Donald Duk’s best friend, Arnold Azalea, serves as a foil for the bitterness and

disdain Donald Duk feels for his ethnicity and culture. Arnold’s family often eats in

King Duk’s restaurant. Arnold is completely fascinated by the Chinese culture and

the differences between his culture and Donald’s. Donald cannot understand Arnolds

fascination and narrates, “Arnold likes Chinese food…And, oh no! before Donald

knows it, Arnold is sleeping over the whole two weeks before the parade… the

Chinese New Year parade” (Chin 11). Everything that Donald dislikes about his

culture, Arnold finds enthralling. Everything Donald’s uncle, father and mother want

to teach Donald about Chinese culture, Donald does not want to hear. However,

Arnold does want to hear the stories and traditions and this makes Donald angry and

upset. The discrimination and racism Donald experiences in school and around

Chinatown only makes him want to be more like Arnold: white and American.

However, because of Arnold’s curiosity and enthusiasm about Chinese culture,

Donald slowly begins to come to terms with his identity throughout the course of the
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novel.

Food also serves as a very important symbol in the tradition of celebrating the

Chinese New Year. According to “The Anthropology of Food and Eating”,

“Ethnographers have found multiple entry points for the study of how humans

connect food to rituals, symbols, and belief systems…food ‘binds’ people to their

faiths through ‘powerful links between food and memory’” (Mintz, DuBois 107).

This is exactly what food symbolizes throughout this novel when given as sacrifice

or eaten as ritual. For example, the morning of the New Year is filled with ritual the

Duk family engages in, closely revolved around food. They go to buy all of the

seafood for the New Years feast and the preparation becomes very elaborate. King

Duk explains, “A banquet is a banquet because all the food is special, not common

nothing ordinary” (Chin 39). Donald Duk describes his father performing yearly

rituals and beginning to prepare the meal:

Dad is in the kitchen fixing up a family-style dinner his way. He’s cooking
without meat. The first dinner at home with the family on the first night of the
first day of the new year is meatless. How meatless is meatless is a
matter of family whim…Tonight: no meat, no animal fat…Dad’s hands and arms
disappear into the steam with bamboo brushes… and seasons each of them
fresh for the rest of the year with oil, garlic, ginger, black beans, sugar and
sherry. The steam and smoke book and mush-room-cloud about Donald Duk’s
father as he tosses piles of raw shrimp past and bowls of cold sliced fish and
fruit, and waves his tools into and out of the roiling atmosphere. (Chin
63)
 22

This ritual that King Duk participates in marks the New Year every year. Donald Duk

watches his father and is engulfed not only by the actual fumes but by the

metaphorical dance his father is creating with food. This above excerpt reads like a

fluid warrior dance, exuding masculinity, rhythm, and grace.

Another ritual that sparks memories and reinforces tradition is the way the

Duk family honor their ancestors during the New Year celebration. In the middle of

the dining table is a family shrine with photographs, incense, a steamed chicken, three

rice bowls, three cups of tea, tangerines, grapefruit, and a teapot, “should the

ancestors care for more tea” (Chin 65). Food is symbolic of remembrance and ritual

as even the dead are offered sustenance. As the other children “get down on their

hands and knees and kow-tow, bonking their foreheads on the floor”, Donald Duk

does not participate and narrates that he “feels more American for not doing it” (Chin

66). Despite the normality of the ritual as he watches his other siblings and neighbors

take part, Donald Duk stil feels conflicted. He does not want to take part in the more

long-established “less American” traditions that make him more Chinese than he

wants to be.

As the novel continues to transgress through the first eighteen days of the New

Year, Donald begins to have dreams about his ancestors’ past. In his dreams he is a

boy, working on the railroad just like all of the other Chinese men who historically

did so and didn’t receive credit for it. As the dreams continue night after night,

Donald Duk begins to take more pride in his culture and ethnicity. Throughout the
 23

dreams, Donald is always aware of what the people are eating and sees that they eat

deem sum, a Cantonese traditional dish that involves small individual portions of

food, usually steamed in a wicker basket. When he sees that his ancestors ate the

foods that his family still eats, Donald feels a connectedness to them and their

struggle. When he wakes up from his dreams he is transported back into the real

world where he lives and feels the pull between assimilating to American culture and

embracing his Chinese background and ethnicity. When he looks up the truth in

books, Donald Duk tells his father, “It’s not fair!” to which King Duk replies,

They don’t want our names in their history books…You think if you are a real
good boy for them, do what they do, like what they like, get good grades in
their schools, they will take care of you forever?... You’re dreaming boy. So,
don’t expect me to get mad or be surprised the bokgwi never told our history in
any of their books you happen to read in the libaray, looking for yourself. You
gotta keep the history yourself or lose it forever, boy. That’s the mandate of
heaven (Chin 123).

King Duk expresses this to Donald from the kitchen, as the strongest male influence

in Donald Duk’s life. He also shows his son strength and the ability to care for his

family from a job that is based behind the stove. Food is mascunalized in this way, as

opposed to the way it is feminized in the other novels explored thus far.

Another way Chin seems to redefine masculinity is when Donald Duk finds

his father charitably leaving fifty pound bags of rice at the front doors of those in

need. When Donald asks his father what he is doing, his father replies, “We’re going
 24

to leave a fifty pound sack of rice at the door of every apartment on this side of the

block “ (Chin 137). And when Donald asks why, his father answers simply with one

word: “tradition” (Chin 137). Giving food to those in need only further convinces

Donald that the traditions born from his culture are something to be proud of. He

joins his father and his uncle in the donation of rice and then joins them at the

restaurant for a “midnight snack”. Donald Duk sits between them at his father’s

restaurant and admires them while they eat traditional Chinese food and talk about the

New Year. At this point in the novel, Donald Duk is no longer conflicted. The novel

ends with a saying that Donald’s father told him at the beginning; “like everything

else, it begins and ends with Kingdoms rise and fall. Nations come and go, and food”

(Chin 173). Donald Duk comes to terms with his identity after realizing what his

ancestors went to in order to live freely and also after seeing the role that food and

family play in his life. The food depicted in this novel is a representation of Chinese

culture, tradition and charity, which brings Donald Duk to finally accepting his

identity as a Chinese-American and embracing his rich culture and ethnicity.

Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Crescent, revolves around Sirine, an Arab-American

woman who uses food as a way of communication in expressing love, memory and

her Arab ethnicity. However food isn’t used only as a tool of expression throughout

the novel, food makes up a large part of Sirine’s identity. The novel brings the culture

of Iraq all the way to Los Angeles, into a restaurant called Nadia’s Café, where Sirine

is the chef. Newly arrived Iraqi’s come to the restaurant to tell stories of exile and
 25

their memories of life in their forgotten country. What brings them all together to tell

their stories is of course, Sirine’s food. The culture of the Arab-American immigrant

experience is understood through the context of the café and Sirine cultivates the

feelings of story telling and culture filled with warmth and richness while finding her

identity as an Arab-American woman living in the United States.

Sirine’s identity is conflicted, much like the other protagonists explored

throughout the previously mentioned novels, because she is half white and half Arab.

There is one part of her identity that she is absolutely certain of however, and that

piece of her identity is as a chef and a lover of all things food. Her body is marked

and stained by the important role food plays in her identity. Sirine’s “arms are dashed

with red slivers of burns, and as she bends to scrape the grill surface she feels its

smell passing into her hair and clothes. Even after a day off, she can still catch whiffs

of it as she turns her head” (Abu-Jaber 17). The smell of food is embedded in her

identity and this is the one part of her identity that she is completely sure of.

This is apparent in situations throughout the novel when Sirine feels nervous or

unsure of herself. She “settles herself by thinking of braised squb: a sauce for wild

game with motes of cinnamon and smoke” (Abu-Jaber 26). There are other parts of

her identity however, that she is very unsure of as “she is, somehow, thirty-nine and a

half years old; her parents are dead; she has never married. The memories of all her

past boyfriends are so faded…they always loved her cooking—even the ones who’d

never bitten into a falafel or scooped up hummus in pita bread before” (Abu-Jaber
 26

35). Because her parents died when she was only nine years old, Sirine does not have

a strong understanding of who she is or where she comes from. As a woman, Sirine

remains a virgin and her sexual inexperience and insecurity is only strong when

defined through her experiences with food. There are many parts that are left

unexplored of Sirene’s identity until she begins to explore her sexuality, find love,

and really understand what it means to be an Arab-American woman living in the

United States. Um-Nadia compares Sirine to an onion, saying, “ ‘And here is our

beautiful Sirine, whiter than this’ She takes a bite out of a whole peeled onion as if it

were an apple” (Abu-Jaber 37). The onion here is symbolic of Sirine’s complexity as

she has many layers and is also a symbol of her fare, white skin, which often

categorizes her as someone she is not:

All she can see is white…She is so white. Entirely her mother. That’s all
anyone can see: when people ask her nationality they react with astonishment
when she says she’s half-Arab. I never would have thought that, they say,
laughing. You sure don’t look it. (Abu-Jaber 205)

Skin color becomes a negative part of Sirine’s identity as it reinforces the common

stereotype as an ethnic marker, in the assumption that all Arabs are dark. However,

when it comes to food, Sirine understands her identity through it and that is why she

decides to cook “a menu that claimed to be ‘Real True Arab Food’” (Abu-Jaber 19).

The theme of having left home is strongly threaded throughout the novel and

food becomes a way for immigrants to feel a bit closer to what was once familiar.
 27

Many immigrants have to sacrifice a unified sense of self when they move to the

United States and leave their homes. Um-Nadia, the restaurant owner says, “The

loneliness of the Arab is a terrible thing; it is all consuming… it threatens to swallow

him whole when he leaves his own country” (Abu Jaber 19). Even though Sirine

sometimes “ senses these feelings rushing in her own blood” she says that cooking the

“almost forgotten dishes of her childhood,” give her a sense of “returning to her

earliest memories” (Abu-Jaber 19). For Sirine, cooking becomes her home. It is what

she is familiar with and what ties her to her mother and father before their deaths.

When students come into café, the flavors that Sirine cooks up are the closest

thing the students and diners have to feeling at home.

Occasionally, a student would linger at the counter talking to Sirine. He would

tell her how painful it is to be an immigrant—even if it was what he’d
wanted all his life—sometimes especially if it was what he’d wanted all his
life. Americans, he would tell her, don’t have the time or the space in their lives for
the sort of friendship—days of coffee-drinking and talking—that the Arab
students craved. For many of them the café was a little flavor of home.”
(Abu- Jaber 20)

This excerpt exemplifies the impact that Sirine’s cooking has on the students’

community. The food, smells, and coffee culture within the café allow for them to

feel comfortable and most importantly it brings the community together to keep the

Arab culture alive. Food serves as a mode of transportation, bringing the immigrants

of Iraq back home for an instance, whether it is through an aroma or a taste.

 28

However, the Arabs are not the only people that frequent the café as “There

are two American policemen—one white and one black—who come to the café every

day, order fava bean dip and lentils fried with rice and onions, and have become

totally entranced by the Bedouin soap opera plotlines…” (Abu-Jaber 20). The

frequency in these visits demonstrates the way food can immerse a non-Arab in Arab

culture and create a love and interest in something most-likely unfamiliar had they not

been exposed to this particular café. Food can unite all types of people and can also

become a way to better understand different cultures, customs, and television shows.

This also underscores the various ethnic identities that come together to create a sense

of ritual and togetherness, perhaps creating their new home in the process.

The other ethnic minorities that work in the café are Victor and Cristobal, who

epitomize such a community. These characters’ presence reinforces the bridge Sirine

builds between different ethnicities. Commenting on Sirine’s cooking, Victor says,

“Chef isn’t an American cook…Not like the way Americans do food—just dumping

salt into the pot. All the flavors go in the same direction. Chef cooks like we do. In

Mexico, we put cinnamon in with the chocolate and pepper in the sweetcakes, so

things pull apart, you know, make it bigger?” (Abu-Jaber 197). The metaphor of

making food “bigger” re-emphasizes the way people relate to food in a cultural

context. When two cultures take care in producing distinct, beautiful flavors, another

culture can appreciate that. Despite the differences between religion or language,

food can bind people together that would otherwise most-likely not be exposed to one
 29

another and create a bond and sense of mutual respect, widening the ethnic context of

community within minority groups.

As the novel progresses, Sirine’s relationship with Haneef, who is a Middle

Eastern studies Professor at the nearby university, evolves into a passionate love.

Han, originally from Iraq, immigrates to Los Angeles after being exiled from his

country for being a political activist. As he slowly romances Sirine, he evokes

Bagdhad in a different light and Sirine begins to re-discover a culture and a world she

thought she knew. Food is used as a symbol of love throughout the novel and is also

used as a metaphor for sexuality and desire. This is first noted when Sirine describes

Han using food, saying, “There is his beautiful, lightly accented, fluid voice, dark as

chocolate. His accent has nuances of England and Eastern Europe, like a complicated

sauce” (Abu-Jaber 21). As their relationship deepens, the food metaphors become

more intricate as she begins to use not only his character, but hers as well claiming,

“She believes that at one time the elements inside Han and herself had called to each

other, like the way ingredients in a dish speak to each other, a taste of ginger vibrates

with something like desire beside a bit of garlic, or the way a sip of wine might call to

the olive oil in a dish” (Abu Jaber 318). She is explaining that Han compliments her

and brings out elements that otherwise might not be noticed. She is also expressing

how the flavors mentioned are drawn to each other, alluding to their sexual

chemistry. However, the use of food doesn’t only illustrate her sexual desire, it also
 30

highlights the importance of food in Sirine’s life; everything she experiences or feels

can be described through food because food is one of the main aspects that makes up

her identity.

The love she described between her parents is also seen through the use of

food and cooking as well. As Sirine prepares baklava in the kitchen, she is reminded

of the way her parents made the same dessert:

Her mother said that a baklava maker should have sensitive, supple hands. So
she was in charge of opening and unpeeling the paper-thin layers of dough and
placing them in a stack in the tray. Her father was in charge of pastry brushing
each layer of dough with a coat of drawn butter. It was systematic yet
graceful, her mother carefully unpeeling each layer and placing them in the tray,
where Sirine’s father painted them. This was one of the ways that Sirine learned how
her parents loved each other. Their concerted movements like a dance, they
swam together through the round arcs of her mother’s arms and her father’s
tender strokes. (Abu-Jaber 58)

One of the ways in which the richness and tenderness of her parents’ love comes

across is through the thoughtful, careful preparation of the baklava. Food heightens

the emotion and the language used erotic, emoting feelings intimacy. The use of

words such as “brushing”, “unpeeling”, and “tender strokes” evokes strong sensuality

yet they are also words that are used when cooking. This excerpt also proves that

food can have strong sensorial presence in provoking memory. This memory’s origin

is in making of baklava and every strand of effort that goes into preparing it reminds
 31

Sirine of her parent’s love and their ritual. Brinda Mehta, author of Rituals of

Memory: In Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing, argues that food and sex are well

connected in Arabic thinking, stating “Consumption and sexual consummation are

obviously linked, for instance in the Arabic expression al-atyaban, ‘the two good (or

nice) things’” (Mehta 245). The orality of food and sex are made explicityly in an

exhange between Sirine and Han, who feed each other and explore their senses:

Han fills Sirine’s plate and feeds her a morsel of lam from his fingers, as if
food is the private language…the words flow into the eating. And she eats and
eats. The flavors are intense in her motuh, the sweet-almondy fruitiness of the
pistachios beside the smoky sour taste of the sumac, delicate saffron, and
herbal notes of olive. Her stomach begins to ache, unused to so much food.
(Abu-Jaber 266)

This excerpt really draws on the sexuality and chemistry that exists in Sirine and

Han’s relationship. The lovers participate in a sensuous food affair that fulfills their

culinary and sexual desires. This specific part of the novel also serves as a pre-curser

to their love-making and foreshadows Sirine’s loss of virginity, alluding to the

“fruitiness” and then to the “ache, unused to so much…” (Abu-Jaber 266). Food

becomes a metaphor for sexuality and Sirine’s loss of virginity, which strengthens her

identity as a woman and also the importance of food as a crucial part of her identity.

As the pieces of Sirine’s identity begin to come together and she begins to

understand love and sexuality, her longing her Arab identity becomes more apparent.

This is seen in Sirine’s desire to “look…up Iraqi dishes, trying to find the childhood
 32

foods that she’d heard Han speak of, the sfeehas—savory pies stuffed with meat and

spinach—and round mensaf trays piled with lamb and rice and yogurt sauce with

onions” (Abu-Jaber 191). These recipes go beyond the ones she had learned from her

father and mastered as a chef. Sirine desires to know more about Iraq than what she

has learned in her limited exposure to the country and the Los Angeles culture around

her. This desire underscores the anxiety she feels as an Arab-American and the

hyphenated identity growing up in the United States and never visiting her father’s

country. However, what Sirine discovers at the end of the novel is that she will never

fully understand the Iraqi culture as an Arab-American woman living in the United

States. Despite her feelings of displacement, Sirine, just like Pilar, Natalie, and

Donald Duk, Sirine must come to terms with her identity and keep her culture alive

through tradition, memory and most importantly, food.

All of these multi-ethnic novels share commonalities through the usage of

food as literary elements and identity catalysts; however, the importance of food in

literature goes way beyond these four novels. Including food in literature is a way to

preserve tradition, a cultural identity within a certain group of people and promote

cultural understanding. Through the analysis and exploration of food throughout

these four novels it becomes easier to understand each ethnicity through the four very

different cultural lenses. Despite the struggle that these main characters face, they all

find their identities, embracing both their American and ethnic culture. Although

these pieces of literature do represent true cultures, customs, traditions and foods, it is
 33

important to understand they are all works of fiction.

Unfortunately, keeping a strong cultural identity through tradition and food is

not the case for all immigrants that come to the United States today. There are rising

numbers of second and third-generation immigrants that are assimilating to American

culture and losing their ethnic identities, which includes their language and culture.

Within that culture of course, is food. According to the article “Assessing Immigrant

Assimilations: New Empirical and Theoretical Challenges”, “The first generation (the

foreign born) were less assimilated and less exposed to American life than were their

American-born children (the second generation), and their grandchildren (the third

generation) were in turn more like the core American mainstream than their parents”

(Waters, Jimenez 106). According to the 1990 Census report, two-thirds to three

quarters of third generation Cubans and Mexicans do not speak any Spanish (Waters,

Jimenez 110). The three generation model seems to hold true for immigration today:

“The immigrant generation makes some progress but remains dominant in their native

tongue, the second generation is bilingual, and the third generation speaks English

only” (Waters, Jimenez 110).

Along with the loss of language comes the loss of culture. Throughout the

novels explored, however, all of the names of the foods remained in their original

languages including Spanish, Yiddish, Chinese and Arabic. If there is a loss of

language, especially in relation to food, the food culture can be completely lost,

especially with the abundance of processed, packaged and fast food. According to an
 34

article published by the Journal of Consumer Research titled, “Ethnic Migration,

Assimilation, and Consumption”, “The traditional assimilation model postulates that,

overtime, the individual’s behavior patters will become less like those of the culture

of origin and more like the culture of residence” (Wallendorf, Reilly 294). In an

analysis done in the article concerning types of foods, it was shown that Mexican-

Americans, in comparison to Mexicans, “have chosen a pattern of using packaged

prepared tortillas. This is simultaneous evidence of cultural persistence in the

preference for tortillas and of traditional assimilation to the time consciousness of

culture and residence” (Wallendorf, Reilly 299). Unfortunately, this is the reality of

many cultures that assimilate to the American way of easy pre-made products and fast

food. This is apparent in Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban as Lourdes does not bake all of

her pastries and instead has the ones that are too difficult to make delivered to her

shop early every morning. Lourdes has assimilated to the American culture and wants

her family to live the “American dream” and remove anything from her work or

household that reminds her of her native Cuba. King Duk, on the other hand, makes

everything from scratch and takes pride in representing his Chinese culture

accurately. He works all day in the kitchen on New Years in order to make sure that

all of the families within his community have an authentic meal that remains

traditional and true to their origins. The assimilation theory that is more realistic

according to this article is Lourdes’ situation. For many immigrant families in the

United States work takes up most hours of the day and what is easiest is to go to the
 35

convenience store and pick up pre-packaged tortillas and prepared foods to make their

lives easier. What they don’t realize, however, is the detriment they are doing in not

preserving their food culture and ethnic traditions.

However, immigrants are not solely to blame. The California Law Review’s

article, “Fast Food: Opression through Poor Nutrition”, states, “The prevalence of fast

food in low-income urban neighborhoods across the United States, combines with the

lack of access to fresh, healthy good, contributes to an overwhelmingly

disproportionate incidence of food-related death and disease among Latinos as

compared to whites” (Freeman 2222). Many neighborhoods with the highest numbers

of immigrants happen to be these same areas because of affordable housing and the

tendency for immigrants to move where others from their homelands have settled.

Although this study only examines the Latino population, it is necessary to take into

consideration that Latinos make up a large majority of the immigrants immigrating

into the United States steadily. The article also explores the “American” fast food

culture and states, “Now, one in four Americans visits a fast food restaurant every

day” (Freeman 2224). Because Americans are taking less time to prepare homemade

meals, the cultural threads that link food to ethnic tradition seem to be more quickly

diminishing because of the role fast food in the Unite States: “Fast food consumption

increased five times in the Mexican population within one generation of emigration to

the United States. Many Latinos now disdain traditional foods, viewing processed

foods as modern and consequently desirable” (Freeman 2233). This is an

 36

overwhelmingly disappointing truth explored briefly in Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban

as the second and third generation of del Pino women begin to acquire tastes for

“American” food instead of Cuban food. This is a truth reflected accurately,

according to the California Law Review, about a Latino-American culture. The other

cultures explored throughout the novels remain intact, food being the one thread that

truly communicates the culture and ethnicity of Jewish, Chinese and Arab culture.

This can most likely be attributed to the differing socio-economic differences between

Latino and these other cultures. It is important, however, to understand that any

immigrant group’s culture can begin to fade if an effort isn’t made in order to keep

ones language, tradition and food culture alive and strong.

Finally, a positive way to keep culture strong throughout the United States is

by including it in various forms of art such as film, dance, music, and most

importantly, literature. These four multi-ethnic novels play a role in preserving these

cultures’ traditions and foods throughout history. The role of food as a preservation of

culture is extremely crucial because even if generations slowly forget a language or

tradition, food can be the pathway to the connectedness between a person and their

original culture.

Finally, food is one of the most convincing ways of explaining cultural

experience to someone outside of a culture. Throughout various cultures, many

immigrants experience similar experiences coming to the United States and finding

their identities as hyphenated Americans. Food can often bridge cultures and cause a
 37

mutual way of understanding that someone has experienced a similar situation.

Through food and ritual, especially in a country as diverse as the United States, many

people develop appreciation and understanding of other cultures, whether it be by

eating sushi with chop-sticks or Indian food with Naan bread. Diane Abu-Jaber says

in an interview, "I do believe that food is one of the most immediate and most

convincing ways of explaining cultural experience to another person… I could speak

whole paragraphs about the Middle East, but I'd rather give somebody a shish-

kabob... I would rather feed someone, because I do feel that you can't help but have a

kind of insight that comes, not only intellectually, but also emotionally and

physically, from that experience of breaking bread together.” By incorporating food

in multi-ethnic novels such as the ones explored throughout this essay, the authors

have allowed readers to understand these specific ethnic identities through dynamic

cultural windows. Food is one more aspect that allows readers to relate to other

cultures and helps to more fully understand and grasp tradition, story, and most

importantly, cultural identity.

 38

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Blodgett, Harriet. “Food Imagery in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing”. Papers

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Chin, Frank. Donald Duk. Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 1991.

DuBois, Christine, and Sidney Mintz. “The Anthropology of Food and Eating”.

Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 99-119

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Epstein, Terrie. “The Pride and Pain of Chinese Immigration: Folk Rhymes from San

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Friedman, Norman L. “Jewish Popular Culture in Contemporary America”. Judaism.

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 40

Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. Yale University, 2005.

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Lipman, Elinor. The Inn at Lake Devine. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

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Mehta, Brinda J. Rituals of Memory: In Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing. New

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 41

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